Hermesdorf still brings a fresh perspective to dance in San Francisco

Choreographer Kathleen Hermesdorf talks with students after a dance workshop at ODC Commons. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Kathleen Hermesdorf steps out of the dance studio momentarily, aglow and slick with sweat.

“Rock ‘n’ roll modern dance, baby!” she says, before jumping back in.
If this Friday morning is any indication, there is a particularly enrapturing joy and frenetic energy that a class with Hermesdorf exudes. Inside, it’s like some sort of wild party.

The room is vibrating, and everyone hoots and hollers as groups of dancers shuffle in and out of the center of the room in quick dance shifts. In the corner, Albert Mathias, Hermesdorf’s longtime musical collaborator, is improvising an electronic dance beat. As the class concludes, the dancers move in toward Mathias, surrounding him, gyrating wildly, chanting with their hands in the air.

“It’s not always like that, but sometimes it is,” says Hermesdorf, who, at 51, is sprightly after class. To see her, still in action, is in some sense to see the evolution of San Francisco dance in the past 2½ decades — and also to see where it’s still going.

The class is part of Hermesdorf and Mathias’ dance company, La Alternativa, which turned 20 in 2018. The Fresh Festival — the company’s annual dance festival that brings together companies and artists from around the Bay Area and the world for three weeks of experimental classes, exchanges and performances — gathers for the 10th time in various locations starting Friday, Jan. 4, and running through Jan. 27.

Choreographer Kathleen Hermesdorf and music collaborator Albert Mathias lead a workshop. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

“It’s like a long time ago, and it feels like yesterday at the same time,” Mathias says, reflecting on the milestones.

“Our first big piece was 20 years ago,” Hermesdorf says. “We did a big group evening-length piece. It was called ‘Blue 2000.’ We still know all the people who were in it.”

The company has built a strong sense of community during the past two decades. In the early ’90s, many people were moving into the Mission District and putting on shows, including Hermesdorf, who started a company with choreographer Scott Wells (“We would rehearse on tennis courts.”). But near the end of the decade, when she and Mathias started La Alternativa, others were leaving in what amounted to a “mass exodus on some level.” The company was founded after the disbanding of their mentor Sara Shelton Mann’s performance group, Contraband.

“It was a dream of a company,” Hermesdorf says of Mann’s troupe. “It had a live band in it. Everybody had to play music and write songs and sing, and everybody had to dance. It was politicized, but it was also super human, the idea that feeling so much could be ‘contraband’ behavior.”

La Alternativa grew out of the desire to keep that spirit alive. But touring work kept Hermesdorf and Mathias abroad for much of the time.
“We couldn’t fit in the system to build our company — which is, you raise the money and you do a new piece every year — because we were gone half the year,” Hermesdorf says.

The Fresh Festival became their new system: a way to gather funding and premiere a new work, but also to harness the energy they felt in their travels. Staying in different cities for exchanges and festivals fostered an artistic immersion that classes or isolated performances couldn’t provide. Fresh, which began as a weeklong gathering of dance training, has continually expanded to include that fuller experience, gathering the Bay Area’s vast dance community while also drawing in outsiders and introducing them to a still-radical San Francisco dance scene.

“Sometimes we do feel like the other coast,” Hermesdorf says. “Sometimes history doesn’t seem like it gets recorded.”

Fresh is a way to solidify the record, showcasing its lineage with performances by those like Mann, and encouraging the new and experimental.

“I don’t really want to produce stuff that’s been made and toured and done a lot. It’s an arena for new ideas,” says Hermesdorf. The festival has pushed La Alternativa as well, she adds. “It’s diversified our art. It’s diversified our classes. It’s changed our narrowness that maybe was a little bit universally based or was a little like ‘white girl modern dance.’ ”

The festival’s theme this year, “Reckoning,” which is also the name of the work that La Alternativa will premiere at Fresh, invites new engagement. The theme is a questioning of responsibility for “the way the world is now,” Hermesdorf says.

“I want people to feel the energy of more, and the possibility of more. And if we can deal with some of this stuff, the reckoning, let’s get to the other side. Let’s choose compassion. Let’s choose change. Let’s deal with some of the mess so we can get there.”